How many political parties should Brazil have? A data-driven method to assess and reduce fragmentation in multi-party political systems

Abstract

In June 2013, Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation. These were exacerbated by the population's disenchantment towards its highly fragmented party system, which is composed by a very large number of political parties. Under these circumstances, presidents are constrained by informal coalition governments, bringing very harmful consequences to the country. In this work I propose ARRANGE, a dAta dRiven method foRAssessing and reduciNG party fragmEntation in a country. ARRANGE uses as input the roll call data for congress votes on bills and amendments as a proxy for political preferences and ideology. With that, ARRANGE finds the minimum number of parties required to house all congressmen without decreasing party discipline. When applied to Brazil's historical roll call data, ARRANGE was able to generate 31 distinct configurations that, compared with the status quo, have (i) a significant smaller number of parties, (ii) a higher discipline of partisans towards their parties and (iii) a more even distribution of partisans into parties. ARRANGE is fast and parsimonious, relying on a single, intuitive parameter.